Lawsuits Over Who Owns Tweets?

from the omgstop dept

It had to happen eventually. Apparently, there's a lawsuit going on over the "ownership" of a Twitter account that goes by the name OMGFacts, which (as you might have guessed, posts a bunch of random facts). It has nearly two million followers. Not bad. But there's now a federal lawsuit over who actually owns the feed. Apparently, there were two people who ran the account -- a 17-year-old student who started it and his 24-year-old "business partner" whose job it was to help develop the feed and get it more attention. The argument covers a bunch of ground on both intellectual property issues and contract issues. Basically, it seems like a business dispute where the end result is that perhaps neither party comes out of it happy. The Twitter angle just makes it that much more twisted. As Eric Goldman notes in a quote in the article:

"We've had 600 years to develop the rules on books," Goldman said. "We've had less than five years to develop how those rules apply to tweets."

Re: Re:

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It's called Broadcast

The concept of Broadcast seems to be a common brain-lock in 'IP' thinking. Common sense says that if you put something out on a Comms media that anybody can receive - it's 'out there' for whatever 'fair use'. In pre-corporatocrasy days, that meant whatever non-money-making thing the receivers wanted to do.

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